In November 1977 — forty-nine years ago this month — Leonard Cohen released the strangest record of his career. Death of a Ladies’ Man, his fifth studio album, was produced and co-written by Phil Spector, the man who had invented the Wall of Sound, and it sounded like nothing Cohen had ever made before. Where Cohen’s earlier records were spare and quiet — a voice, a guitar, a few instruments, room to breathe — this one was ornate, crowded, overwhelming: multiple tracks of overdubs, a small army of Los Angeles session musicians, backing vocals from Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, and a producer who kept a loaded pistol on the console. Cohen himself called the production “a catastrophe”. He also said, years later, “I’d do it again.”
That contradiction is the story of the album. Death of a Ladies’ Man is a record that should not work, made by two men who should never have worked together, under conditions that should never have been allowed — and it has fascinated listeners ever since, precisely because it should not work. It was released to universal confusion and polarised reviews. It has been called greatly flawed and great and flawed, sometimes in the same sentence. And nearly half a century later, it remains one of the most argued-over albums in rock history: the night the world’s most fatalist introvert met the world’s most flamboyant extrovert, and both of them walked away changed.
Two men on a downward slide
By the mid-1970s, both Cohen and Spector were, in the words of the album’s Wikipedia history, “on a downward slide commercially”. Cohen had been recording for a decade. His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, had appeared in 1967, and he had built a devoted following — above all in Europe, where he remained popular — but he had never achieved the success in the United States that his label, Columbia, had hoped for. He was a poet who sang, a novelist who had turned to music in his thirties, and his audience was loyal but small. America had never quite known what to do with him.
Spector’s slide was steeper and stranger. In the 1960s he had created some of the most famous records ever made — “Be My Baby” with the Ronettes, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” with the Righteous Brothers — with his Wall of Sound production technique, in which layer upon layer of instruments were piled into a single, overwhelming wave of sound. In the early 1970s he had some success producing albums by John Lennon and George Harrison. But by the middle of the decade his behaviour was increasingly erratic. He had withdrawn into his mansion, surrounded by bodyguards and guns, and the music world had begun to treat him as a brilliant man who had lost his way.
It was, on the face of it, an absurd pairing: the quiet Canadian poet and the wild American producer, the minimalist and the maximalist, the man who whispered and the man who shouted. And yet, as Cohen would later say, “the instinct was right”. Something in him wanted to be overwhelmed. Something in him wanted to see what would happen if his songs — small, careful, intimate things — were thrown into the biggest sound in popular music and left to sink or swim.
The locked door
Stories differ as to how Cohen and Spector became collaborators — even the album’s own history admits that — but the liner notes state that Marty Machat, who was Spector’s lawyer as well as Cohen’s, introduced them. According to Cohen, it happened backstage after one of his performances at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Spector had uncharacteristically left his well-protected home to see Cohen, and at the show he was strangely silent. Then he invited Cohen back to his home.
The house, because of the air-conditioning, was very chilly — about “thirty-two degrees”, Cohen recalled. Spector locked the door. And Cohen, faced with a locked door in a freezing house with a silent and unpredictable host, reacted the way a songwriter reacts: “As long as we are locked up, we might as well write some songs together.” They went to the piano and started that night.
For about a month they wrote — and drank — together, and Cohen remembers it as a generous period, although he had to wear an overcoat almost constantly to work in Spector’s freezing home. It is one of the strangest images in the history of popular music: two of its greatest figures, sitting at a piano in overcoats in a house kept at freezing point, writing songs about sex and death while the air-conditioning hummed. But the songs came. Early versions of “Iodine” — then called “Guerrero” — and “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-on” had already been performed in concert as early as 1975, with music credited to John Lissauer, and they were widely available on bootlegs. Now, in Spector’s cold house, the rest of the album took shape.
Not everyone thought it was a good idea. Cohen’s friend and fellow Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell tried to warn him about working with Spector, having witnessed some of the producer’s erratic behaviour during recording sessions with Lennon in Los Angeles. But at least at the early songwriting stage, Cohen and Spector worked well together. The songwriter John Prine, who had also witnessed the producer’s bizarre antics when he had been invited to his house to compose a song together, later marvelled that as soon as Spector “sat down with an instrument, he was normal”. The trouble, as everyone would discover, was what happened when they stood up again — and walked into a studio full of people.
Gold Star
Spector would use three studios for the album, although his favourite remained the Gold Star Studios complex, at 6252 Santa Monica Boulevard near the corner of Vine Street in Hollywood. Gold Star was where Spector had made his great records of the 1960s, and it was a room built for his sound: small, live, crowded with musicians. He recruited a plethora of top-shelf Los Angeles studio musicians to play on the songs, including the guitarists Dan and David Kessel, the drummers Hal Blaine and Jim Keltner, and the pedal steel player Al Perkins, among many others. These were the men who had played on hundreds of hit records. They knew how to play anything, and they knew how to play it loud.
It was precisely in front of an audience, however, that Spector’s megalomaniacal switch turned on, and soon Cohen felt overwhelmed. Speaking to Mojo’s Sylvie Simmons in 2001, Cohen described his feelings at the time: “It was one of those periods when my chops were impaired, and I wasn’t in the right kind of condition to resist Phil’s very strong influence on and eventual takeover of the record. There were lots of guns around in the studio and lots of liquor, a somewhat dangerous atmosphere. He had bodyguards who were heavily armed also. He liked guns — I liked guns too but I generally don’t carry one, and it’s hard to ignore a .45 lying on the console. When I was working with him alone, it was very agreeable, but the more people in the room, the wilder Phil would get. I couldn’t help but admire the extravagance of his performance, but at the time couldn’t really hold my own.”
The most famous moment of the sessions is also the most frightening. During a cryptic exchange detailed in Ira Nadel’s 1996 Cohen biography, Various Positions, Spector pointed a loaded pistol at Cohen’s throat, cocked it, and said, “I love you, Leonard.” Quietly, Cohen responded, “I hope you love me, Phil.” It is a story that has been told many times, and it is worth pausing over, because it captures something essential about the whole album: the love and the threat in the same gesture, the tenderness and the violence, the producer holding a gun to the singer’s throat and calling it love. Cohen did not walk out. He stayed, and he sang.
The recording of the nine-minute title track began at 7:30 in the evening and lasted until 2:30 in the morning, with the session musicians working on quadruple time — typical, Nadel writes, of the sessions as a whole. Another night, the poet Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan showed up and were ordered by Spector to sing background vocals on the raucously burlesque “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-on”. Imagine it: Dylan and Ginsberg, two of the great voices of American literature and song, standing in a Hollywood studio at Spector’s command, singing backup on a song about going home with an erection. It is absurd, and it is also, in a way, the whole album in miniature — high art and low comedy, poetry and burlesque, genius and chaos, all in the same room at the same time.
The songs
Death of a Ladies’ Man contains eight tracks and runs for 42 minutes and 31 seconds. Most of the songs deal with themes of unbridled sexuality and brutal voyeurism, and they are couched in Spector’s bombastic sprawl of sonic grandeur. “Paper Thin Hotel” opens with one of the most uncomfortable images in Cohen’s whole catalogue: “The walls of this hotel are paper thin / Last night I heard you making love to him…” It is a song about listening to someone else’s intimacy through a wall, about the cruelty of proximity, about the way desire makes eavesdroppers of us all. In Cohen’s earlier records, that image would have been delivered in a whisper, with a guitar. Here it arrives in a wall of sound, with drums and strings and backing vocals, as if the hotel itself were singing.
The buoyant “Fingerprints” is a fiddle-infused hootenanny that recalls Cohen’s love of country music — a reminder that the poet from Montreal had always loved Nashville as much as Paris, and that his songs had always had one foot in the country tradition. “Memories” is a doo-wop pastiche, a song about looking back at a lost love through the sound of the 1950s. “True Love Leaves No Traces” is the album’s most Cohen-like song, a quiet, fatalistic ballad about a love that ends without a mark. And the title track, nine minutes long, is the album’s centrepiece: a long, sprawling, half-spoken meditation on the death of the ladies’ man himself — the character Cohen had played for a decade, the seducer, the romantic, the man who had built a career on desire — now laid out, examined, and buried under Spector’s wall of sound.
The album was recorded in June and July 1977, in the heat of a Los Angeles summer, in studios full of guns and liquor and bodyguards. It was, by every account, a difficult birth. And yet the songs survived it. They survived the Wall of Sound, the guns, the freezing house, the locked door. They are still there, underneath all of it — Cohen’s melodies, Cohen’s words, Cohen’s voice, small and unmistakable, at the centre of the noise.
The tapes disappear
The sessions did not even, in the words of Anthony Reynolds’s 2010 Cohen biography, “officially” end. One day Phil just failed to return to the studio, keeping all the tapes — as he had done with Lennon’s masters — and going on to mix them alone. Cohen was aghast. He did not consider his recorded vocals to be anywhere near definitive. As far as he was concerned they were merely “guide” vocals, for the benefit of the musicians. He had expected to be able to take time on his singing, but with Spector holding the tapes hostage at an unknown location, this now seemed impossible — unless, as Cohen put it, he brought his own bunch of heavies to take on Spector’s. “I had the option of hiring my own private army and fighting it out with him on Sunset Boulevard or letting it go… I let it go.”
Marty Machat’s son Steven Machat secured a deal with Warner Bros. to release the record, one that Cohen would always harbour mixed feelings about. The album was originally released in the United States by Warner Bros., and on CD and in the rest of the world by Cohen’s longtime label, Columbia Records. It was a strange arrangement for a strange record: two labels, two countries, one album that neither side quite knew what to do with.
Cohen’s own feelings about the record hardened over time, and then softened again. At the time of the album’s release, he was much less generous in his public response, calling Spector’s production “a catastrophe”. But years later, talking to Adrian Deevoy of Q magazine in 1991, he was more forgiving — and more honest: “I’m too ashamed to tell the whole truth of what happened there. People were skating around on bullets, guns were finding their way into hamburgers, guns were all over the place. It wasn’t safe. It was mayhem, but it was part of the times. It was rather drug-driven. But I like Phil, and the instinct was right. I’d do it again.” And in the 2005 documentary I’m Your Man, he expressed disappointment in the record and felt that the songs “got away” from him — but he also noted that it was a favourite among “punksters” as well as his daughter. The punks, it turned out, understood something about the record that the critics of 1977 had missed: that its messiness was part of its power, that its chaos was honest, that a record made under a gun could not help but sound like it.
Reception, and the long afterlife
Death of a Ladies’ Man was released to universal confusion and polarised reviews, leaving many die-hard Cohen fans stunned. In his review for Rolling Stone, Paul Nelson wrote that the album is “either greatly flawed or great and flawed” and observed, “Too much of the record sounds like the world’s most flamboyant extrovert producing and arranging the world’s most fatalist introvert.” Nelson criticised Spector’s contributions to the album, such as his Wall of Sound, as “anything but lethal”, particularly the track “Memories”, which he characterised as a “doo-wop nightmare”. The Toronto Star declared in large type, “Leonard Cohen is for Musical Sadists”.
The album reached number 35 on the UK Albums chart. Its singles were “Memories”, released in December 1977, and “True Love Leaves No Traces”, released in March 1978. Of the album’s eight selections, “Memories” is the only track Cohen regularly performed in concert, on tours in 1979, 1980 and 1985. He apparently liked the song enough that he included it in his 1983 experimental art film I Am a Hotel, as the sole non-acoustic piece alongside four other songs: “Suzanne”, “Chelsea Hotel #2”, “The Guests” and “The Gypsy’s Wife”. A “de-Spectorized” version of “Memories” ended up being released when Cohen’s album Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979 was issued in 2001, with a saxophone solo different from the album version’s. It is a telling detail: that even Cohen, who had let the record go, kept coming back to “Memories”, kept trying to hear it without the wall, kept wondering what the song had sounded like before Spector got to it.
In 1978, Cohen released a book of poetry with the slightly altered title Death of a Lady’s Man. It has nothing in common with the album, with only one exception: it contains the poem “Death of a Lady’s Man”, which is identical to the lyrics of the album’s title song. It is as if Cohen wanted to rescue the words from the record, to print them on a page where they could be read quietly, without guns and without the Wall of Sound — to give the ladies’ man a second death, a quieter one.
The album cover, too, tells a story. The liner notes disclose that the photo was taken by an “Anonymous Roving Photographer at a Forgotten Polynesian Restaurant”. It features Eva LaPierre, Cohen, Suzanne Elrod and Lorca Cohen. It is a strange, candid, slightly blurry photograph — not a studio portrait, not a piece of design, but a snapshot from a restaurant that no one remembers, by a photographer no one can name. It is the right cover for the record: an accident, a found object, a moment that happened and was never quite explained.
What remains
Forty-nine years after its release, Death of a Ladies’ Man remains the most divisive record Leonard Cohen ever made — and one of the most loved, by the people who love it. It is loved not in spite of its chaos but because of it. It is the sound of two geniuses, each at a difficult moment in his life, locked in a freezing house and then in a studio full of guns, making something neither of them could have made alone. It is the sound of Cohen’s songs surviving the Wall of Sound, and of the Wall of Sound surviving Cohen’s songs. It is, as Paul Nelson wrote, either greatly flawed or great and flawed — and the argument about which of those it is has now been going on for nearly half a century, which is itself a kind of answer.
Cohen went on to make many more records, and to become, in his last decade, one of the most revered performers in the world — the old man in the suit, singing “Hallelujah” to arenas full of people who had not been born when Death of a Ladies’ Man was recorded. He never made another record like it. He never worked with Spector again. But he never disowned it, either. “I’d do it again,” he said. And the songs, which he once thought had got away from him, are still here — “Memories” and “True Love Leaves No Traces” and “Paper Thin Hotel” and the nine-minute title track, with its 7:30 p.m. start and its 2:30 a.m. finish, with Dylan and Ginsberg singing in the background, with the pistol on the console and the .45 on the desk, with the whole beautiful, dangerous mess of it. The ladies’ man died in November 1977. The songs did not.
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